Excuse No. 3 - "I have a ridiculously-important exam on Monday, I can't afford to take time off from studying."

Listen, ten years from now, you will not remember that exam. You will not remember most anything from any of your classes. The only bits of knowledge from your Syracuse education that you will retain are a series of facts that will come in handy during dinner parties. "Hey, did you know the difference between Doric and Ionic columns? Here, let me show you..."

But you WILL remember every great moment at Syracuse basketball and football games. You will remember where you were when SU beat Pitt on a last-second touchdown, everyone stormed the field, you touched Ryan Nassib's arm as he ran past you and you woke up the next morning in the middle of the road on Comstock. Well, you won't remember what happened between the hours of 5pm and 5am the next morning...but you'll remember everything else.

Bloggers, media types and fans have chewed out Orange Nation upon hearing the disappointing ticket number. CNY will sell 28,000 seats to watch SU thrash the dregs of Big East basketball with thirteen inches of snow on the ground and I-81 choked to a halt. But a huge conference football game on a beautiful fall weekend with BCS implications following a potentially program-changing win? Meh.

... It’s safe to pile on the basketball bandwagon. We know it won’t pop four tires at 120-mph and crash into a nitroglycerin plant (as the football program has done the last five years).

We’d all love a jammed Dome with 50,000 lunatics and deafening noise every Saturday. Syracuse football historically has been pretty good and there’s plenty to be proud of (just listen to Darryl Gross every time he tells us). But there isn’t a national championship seven years ago with four Top-4 rankings (the equivalent to a Final Four) within the last generation. There’s a title from the Eisenhower administration and an Insight Bowl that’s almost a decade old.

Go out and beat the Panthers. Show up in the “others receiving votes” category. Compete for the Big East title and a BCS bid. Then we’ll buy in even more. But if the Orange get smacked by four touchdowns and is actually a 5-7 team that got fat on a pathetic early season schedule, aren’t the fans who didn’t buy in this weekend validated?